| schema:articleBody
| - The only Native American on federal death row, a man convicted of murder nearly 20 years ago, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday against wishes of the Navajo Nation which calls the sentence an affront to its sovereignty. Barring an 11th-hour grant of clemency, Lezmond Mitchell, 38, will become the fourth person to die by lethal injection since the government decision to lift a 16-year moratorium on federal executions. Most crimes committed in the United States are tried in state courts, some of which are authorized to apply capital punishment. But federal courts can take up and try the most serious cases. Another federal inmate, Keith Nelson, 45, is due to be executed Friday for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl in 1999. Mitchell is scheduled to be put to death at 4:00 p.m. local time (2000 GMT) at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was convicted of fatally stabbing a 63-year-old grandmother during a car theft and slitting the throat and crushing the skull of her nine-year-old granddaughter. He then buried the heads and hands of the two victims. Because the killings occurred on Navajo territory in Arizona and the victims were tribe members, US authorities should have obtained approval of the Navajo Nation for the death penalty, say community officials who point to a 1994 law governing Native American tribal sovereignty. The Navajo refuse to apply capital punishment to Native Americans, and the victims' family had asked that Mitchell be sentenced to life imprisonment. But the government secured the death sentence "by exploiting a loophole" by charging Mitchell with "carjacking resulting in death," a capital crime that, unlike murder, requires no tribal consent for capital punishment, Mitchell's supporters argued. "If this execution goes forward, the precedent will be set that, no matter the sovereign position of any Indian tribe, the federal government can kill American Indians, and (Navajo) specifically," Navajo Nation Council delegate Carl Roessel Slater said this month in a statement. Jonathan Nez, president of the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States, has asked President Donald Trump to commute Mitchell's sentence to life imprisonment out of respect for the tribe's "religious and traditional beliefs." US Attorney General Bill Barr announced the resumption of federal executions last year, after Trump expressed support for the move. The Republican billionaire, who is standing for re-election on November 3, has advocated expanding the use of the death penalty, in particular for those convicted of killing police officers or children and for drug traffickers. Support for the death penalty has eroded among the general US population but remains strong among Republican voters. Three people sentenced to death for the murder of children were executed in July. At the time, only three had been executed at the federal level since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1988. They included Timothy McVeigh, who was executed in 2001 for conducting the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995. cyj-mlm/ft
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)